How to test your messaging with five customer calls

Five short calls with real customers tell you more about your messaging than another round of internal edits.

Who to call

Five customers, or five people who bought something like yours. Mix new and long-standing if you can. Ask for 20 minutes and say it is research, not a sales call.

What to ask

1. What were you doing before you found us?
2. What made you start looking?
3. What did you compare us with, including doing nothing?
4. What nearly stopped you from buying?
5. How would you describe us to a colleague?

How to run it

• Record the call if they agree, or take notes in their exact words.
• Do not explain the product. Let silences run.
• Ask "why" once after each answer, then stop.

What to do with the answers

• Highlight the phrases that come up in more than one call. Those are your headline candidates.
• Write down the objections. Each one needs an answer on the page.
• Compare question 5 with your current homepage headline. Where they differ, the customer's version usually wins.

Keep a one-page summary: the repeated phrases, the objections and the three changes you will make first. A human should read the raw notes before anything is rewritten; summaries lose the details that matter.